All posts by Jeff Lucas
What is an Accurate Survey?
The surveying profession has always been a measure-centric profession. What I mean by that is surveyors love their measurements, and that is where the primary focus of surveying practice has been concentrated from the very beginning. We have always been the expert measurers in the room. We can analyze our measurements, run closures, make adjustments,...
Are Surveyor’s Immune To Prosecution?
In the early part of my career as a land surveyor I got the impression that many of the licensed land surveyors I encountered in the workplace or at social gatherings had a sense of legal immunity when it came to the results of their boundary surveying work. I remember an instance at a society...
Do Surveyor’s Determine Ownership Limits?
Do Surveyor’s Determine Ownership Limits?
Are Surveyors Professionals or Merely Technicians?
Legal Boundaries This is a question that has haunted the surveying profession for years if not decades. A second related question is: What’s the difference? Curtis Brown addressed this issue in an article he wrote that in 1961 that was published in the ACSM’s Surveying and Mapping magazine, entitled “The Professional Status of Land Surveyors.”...
Let’s Get Real About Property
One of the more serious problems with the surveying profession is our schizophrenic relationship with property and the associated property rights. For my entire professional surveying career, too many surveyors seem to think we have nothing to do with property rights; that our job is to simply layout the math and measurements contained in the...
Title Insurance and Boundary Surveys
Legal Boundaries What many surveyors might not know about title insurance and boundary surveys is they are intricately intertwined, due primarily to the unilateral efforts of the title companies issuing title insurance policies. Unilateral in the sense that the title company can issue a title policy with what is refers to as “survey coverage,” on...
